Tricking your observation to Research Grade

Bug Reports
1

Step 1: You post an observation with a species level ID.

Step 2: Someone else agrees on genus or family level, therefore not confirming your species ID.

Step 3: You scroll down and set “Can community taxon be confirmed improved” to “No”.

Now you have pushed your species level ID to “Research Grade” without anyone actually agreeing to it.

Resulting issues:

  1. RG means that identifiers who look out for “Needs ID” observations will never find the observation.
  2. On the surface it looks like this species has been agreed upon, therefore messing up the RG dataset on iNaturalist and confusing other users.
  3. Someone disagreeing on genus level will automatically push the ID back to genus level while the observation still remains RG, although an improvement might be made.
  4. Someone pushing back the ID to family level or higher will automatically set the observation to “casual”, which would be a shame for otherwise good observations.

Probably someone mentioned this already. But I have seen this going on for a while now (especially concerning but not limited to one specific user), so I thought it might be a good idea to bring this up (again).

2

Hi, yes, there is already an open bug report for this issue here, so I’ll close this duplicate report.

3

Thank you for the link. But this is from 2019, last entry from 2021! :(
After 5 years of nothing happening I really think the issue can be brought up again. Because dealing with that all the time really messes up my identification workflow.

3 Likes
4

You can continue the conversation on the existing bug report (if there is anything new to add).

1 Like